Chris Blattman: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why isn’t how they feel about their lives, their future, their country — The way I think about this is that there’s usually a narrow set of people who decide whether or not to go to war, and those people are either accountable or not accountable to lots of people. In the places where they’re accountable to everybody else, people have an enormous amount of stake not to go to war, and so, small gradations as to whether or not they have one child or two children or a little bit more weight on the future . . . War is just so hugely painful that, I think, if you give those people a lot of influence, they’re going to press their leaders not to go to war, in general. I just don’t see this perturbation or this trend as fundamentally shaping that calculus, just because there’s already this overwhelming incentive not to have their leaders invade somebody. If you look at the marginal cases — since there are some wars — there’s a bunch of cases, even if unusual, where someone is right at the margin. At the margin, what are the factors that are most likely to account for the explanatory variation in whether or not a country goes to war?…

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